Celebration Slam is a live spoken word and percussive performance our team presented for the Dia de los Muertos Exhibition in October. We worked in groups of four to write an original poem to perform in "spoken word" style. We also designed and created an original rhythm to accompany our spoken word piece.
The theme of the project was to write a poem reflecting and celebrating the lives we want to live. Each poem was like a mantra, a promise to life in the mirror of death.
On the Humanities side of the Tiny House Project, we focused on interviewing and creating our book. The first day we met our artists, we interviewed them. Not only did we have to make a good first impression, but we had to be prepared for our interview. We learned about active listening, body language, open ended questions and transcribing through mock interviews and actually interviewing our artists.
We took the information that we got from our artists and wrote articles about their life and art. After many drafts of the articles, we put them all together in a book called A Tiny Home Is Where The HeART Is. We used a website called LucidPress to create the book.
When we first sat down with our artist it was a little uncomfortable. But before we knew it, Roy was telling us all his stories about college and friends and how that has all influenced his art. One of our biggest strengths during this was actively listening to what Roy had to say. We were so engaged in the conversation and we were asking follow up questions. Being able to listen to him really helped us out with designing his house because we were able to add personal touches based on his stories.
I think one thing we could have worked on is making the physics questions less straightforward. I would have wanted to re-phrase them to get an explanation out of them. I think this would have let us get to know Roy even more.
Although our book came out successful it wasn't all smooth sailing. We faced a lot of bumps and had to troubleshoot through them. My biggest struggle was making my article sound less like a robot. I still wanted to give the reader information about my artist, but not in a way that would put them to sleep. When I realized this I challenged myself to use other words to start off sentences than he or Roy. Also when we were working on LucidPress it was very difficult to do what we wanted in a timely manner. Because everyone was on the program at the same time we often had to wait for it to load again. Some days it was very frustrating but we were able to get through it and produce a professional book.
There was also may triumphs to writing and publishing our book. After you've been frustrated for so long, seeing your ages come together is such a big accomplishment. I remember just taking a second to just take in what my partner and I had created, and we were so proud of it. This also made sharing our finished book at exhibition such a proud moment because it was the time to show off all of our hard work.
After learning about Shakespeare and his sonnets it was almost time to read Romeo and Juliet. But before we could start we had to create hats for the many characters that make Romeo and Juliet so famous. We learned that Shakespeare's characters are used a lot in TV shows and movies today. His plots and characters are re-used over and over again in our film industry. Each character is memorable in their own way and some characters bring out traits in others. We had to construct a hat that embodied our character in some way.
My partner, Kandy, and I knew that we wanted to incorporate angel wings or a halo, something to represent how Benvolio is a good guy and trustworthy. We thought an angel is the perfect representation of who Benvolio is. I think embodying Benvolio in our hat was one of our biggest strengths.
However I think we could have put more effort into the construction of his hat. I think we could have been more creative and done way more with the angel idea. Part of Romeo's costume was a cape. I think we could have made actual angel wings that the person playing the character could wear.